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June 19, 2025 - Epoch Times
22:55
The Rise in Cardiovascular Conditions, Myocarditis in Children: Dr. Kirk Milhoan
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And now what I'm seeing four years later, five years later, is I'm seeing this constant and a dramatic change in who I'm seeing coming to see me.
They're complaining their heart doesn't beat normally, and it beats fast for no reason at all.
Dr. Kirk Milhoen is a pediatric cardiologist and senior fellow at the Independent Medical Alliance.
He has been treating children experiencing myocarditis and other cardiovascular issues associated with COVID-19 and the COVID-19 genetic vaccines.
In this episode, we dive into the rise of cardiovascular conditions in children and how to better address and understand them.
We need to return the idea of a patient-doctor relationship.
It's not necessarily a provider.
You're not a consumer.
We've made this too marketing-oriented.
We need to go back to, I'm a physician who cares for you because I have compassion for you.
And because of my compassion, I want you to do well.
And I want you to be healthy.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Keller.
Dr. Kirk Mulhoin, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thanks for having me.
I really appreciate it.
There's been a marked rise in cardiac problems in children over the last several years.
A lot of different information out there about that, all the way from this isn't happening to it being a massive problem.
What's the reality?
The reality is there's something really happened.
What people are sensing has happened has happened.
And we have seen a change in myocarditis in children, especially in boys, that is temporarily related to the onset of the introduction of the COVID vaccine.
We had seen a little bit of inflammation of the heart in something that's called multisystem inflammatory syndrome of children that caused almost the whole body to become inflamed.
But specifically after the second dose of the new platform for COVID vaccine, we were seeing an increase in myocarditis in children that we've never seen before with any vaccine product in children.
Well, and this is something that was talked about actually pretty early in the deployment, that there was this issue with myocarditis.
Yes, they actually, with more of the FOIA requests and understanding what was going on beforehand, even in their phase 2, phase 3 trials, this was a concern.
And they had put that in as a concern.
It would be something, it would be one of the ones they were watching for as a signal.
Can you quantify for me where we stand today?
I mean, you yourself are a cardiologist, a pediatrician.
What are you seeing?
So I think we have seen the peak of the myocarditis in terms of the acute myocarditis because hardly any children are getting any more of the vaccine or boosters.
It's still happening, but very, very little uptake, especially because the parents just don't want it anymore.
COVID's largely gone away.
It has become much more just like a respiratory illness.
And so the fear of their children dying or they're causing someone else to die that's gone away.
So the myocarditis is decreasing.
So that's what I'm seeing more of.
The problem with the myocarditis that we saw, especially in 2021, 2022, is that it could be a silent killer.
And that is that the scar can be there.
And a scar forms after myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart.
So you can imagine it's sort of like a charley horse.
If your muscle gets bruised.
If you get a charley horse, what do you want to do?
You want to rest that muscle.
If you go on a long run and your legs are sore the next day, the day after, you're like, oh my gosh, my legs, I just want to rest.
I don't want to do anything.
That is what It's an inflammation of the heart.
The problem is, is we never allow our heart to rest.
So we are expecting that heart to beat almost every second, every minute, every hour, every day.
It's a heart that needs time to repair.
And the way the heart repairs this is a lot of times what it does is it sends in all these agents that sort of Cry foul and say something's wrong.
And so the body says, okay, what must we do?
We got to come in here.
Something's injured us.
And so what they'll do is sort of make little dams with fiber.
So that causes this little fibrous scars.
And if there's a lot of damage, you'll have big scars.
And if there's a little damage, you'll have little scars.
It's really hard for us on our basic evaluation of children to know if they have silent big scars or silent small scars.
We can usually help them to identify if they have low risk for a heart event.
But this is the big concern, is what people have been seeing is it seems like a lot more athletes, just from what is concerned, is that a lot more elite athletes have died following the vaccine.
And so that is where I hear concern is not only from doctors, can I approve this child to do sports, but also from athletes, can I push myself?
Am I safe to push myself?
Well, and so how?
How common is this exactly?
That's the other question.
This certainly isn't everybody by any means.
No, not at all.
That's one piece.
The second piece is people recover from this.
We're still trying to figure this out because we don't necessarily know how many people might have it silently.
So the absolute numbers are questionable.
I think if you were to look at the...
So 96% are maybe having no cardiac effects at all from this.
But this is very specific to age, sex of the person.
So the teenage boys, the young adult males, they were the most likely population to have myocarditis and cardiac issues.
Yeah, this is exactly what I was going to ask.
I mean, 4 out of 100 is not a small number, but is that of all people or people who have had a particular type of COVID product?
No, so when we look at it, it looks like it starts right around puberty.
So as males come into puberty, they have an increase in testosterone.
Testosterone is a pro-inflammatory.
It happened typically in this young adolescence to young adulthood is where we saw the most.
We saw it in women.
We saw it in older people.
But that's where the real spike came.
Tied with the testosterone increase, basically.
Yeah, that's what it seems like.
I also, when I treated patients with COVID, some of the ones that the hardest to treat that seemed to be really affected really significantly by COVID itself were the...
And maybe they were taking some other substances at all to help their bodies get big.
But I think probably that maybe increased testosterone.
Also, that pro-inflammatory hormone was adding with the inflammation that the virus caused because of spike protein or the vaccine caused because it asked our body to make spike protein, which is an incredibly pro-inflammatory agent to your body.
you could be getting myrdocharditis just from COVID.
Are you suggesting it's dose dependent?
Like how much spike is how they probably have the best capture of medical data from how they run their healthcare systems, their electronic medical record.
And so they published this in JAMA Cardiology, and it was the 23 million...
So they looked at all these things, and what they found was is that the unvaccinated had the lowest amount of myocarditis.
If you had one Pfizer, you had more than if you were unvaccinated.
If you had two Pfizer, you had even more.
If you had one Moderna, it was more.
If you had two Moderna, it was even more.
And if you mixed them, it seemed even higher.
All of these were above what we saw with the unvaccinated.
So that sort of answers the question, which is worse, to be unvaccinated or vaccinated?
For myocarditis, it was worse to be vaccinated.
And the Moderna, which seemed worse, is supposed to have three times the amount of the genetic material in it than the Pfizer did.
So we have a dose response, which sort of helps us with establishing causality.
We believe so.
Unfortunately, those studies were never done to see actually how much spike was being produced and sampling that.
And so we're starting to see it in retrospect as we look back at the different studies.
When we look at all these things, then we go, okay, now this has myocarditis.
I mean, it's a very scary word.
If you just say myocarditis in children, if we were to look at all of our comers, and most of the time what we see is caused by a virus.
There are certain numbers of viruses that give these kids, some are born with a myocarditis, their heart dilates because it's weak.
It's a very scary word.
And so in the Lancet study, they started looking at how many kids, after you had myocarditis from the vaccine, so it was temporally related to the vaccine, they looked at, okay, at 90 days, let's study them and look at everything and see how it looks.
And so they studied everything, and they looked at all the different ways that we make ourselves feel better about clearing a child to do athletics.
So that's often what a pediatrician does.
Is it okay for this child to play sports?
I'm sure you get a lot of people asking you that exact question.
How can I be sure it's safe for my child to play sports?
They got two vaccines that can do it.
So what we typically do is you have a physical exam.
On most of the kids, it's normal.
90 days after they have myocarditis, their physical exam is normal.
We do an EKG.
EKGs is normal.
We do a stress test where we put them on a treadmill, look at the EKG, it's normal.
We do an echocardiogram, it's normal.
But in 50% of the cases, if we looked at the cardiac MRI and looked for scar, there was 50% still had scar in their heart, right?
So it's a very complex test where we inject a Heavy metal called gadolinium, and it goes and gets stuck where there's swelling or where there's an actual fibrous scar.
And we saw it at three months, there was still scar there.
So it probably means that that has passed swelling and it's actually a scar has formed.
The problem with scar in the heart, the heart has a whole electrical system that allows the beat.
It initiates a beat and then it spreads throughout the whole heart through an electrical system.
Those scars act as short circuits.
And then they can cause potentially problematic or even fatal rhythms where the heart stops beating and people can die from it.
So depending on how much scar you have can dictate what your risk is.
And if you have enough of this scar, you even have an indication that will put an implantable defibrillator to shock your heart if it goes into a bad rhythm.
So what's concerning for me as a cardiologist is all the things I normally would do for a child.
To say, are you safe to exercise?
I mean, usually I would do an exam and put them through a few things, and I'd go, oh, normal.
If I were really concerned, I'd put them on a treadmill.
The problem is that in 90 days, those kids were all normal.
So then the discussion is, okay, which kid would I give a cardiac MRI for?
Which a lot of insurance companies didn't want.
Yeah, it's a non-trivial thing.
It's expensive.
And there's always a risk.
Anything we do has a risk.
So if you inject a dye for a radiologic procedure, it has risk.
Some people have an allergic reaction to it.
So we're trying to now come and evaluate these kids, which my opinion as a pediatric cardiologist is in what's...
Unfortunately, now this came out very quickly.
It was a whole new platform.
And now we're seeing problems that are even in excess of what we considered that may be a problem at the beginning.
Dr. Malhone, just one quick sec.
We're going to take a break.
And folks, we're going to be right back.
And we're back with pediatric cardiologist Dr. Kirk Milhoun.
Now you're talking in terms of heart problems.
Yeah.
So just like the overall incidence of heart problems, this is taking us back to the beginning.
You said that the phenomenon is real.
Yeah.
Any estimates on how real?
I think those are the hard numbers.
I can tell you what, as we look at vaccines causing injury.
We looked for the last 30 years, and we have the same amount of vaccine injury sort of sitting as a baseline.
And we're looking at 280, 290 million vaccines a year.
And we have this baseline.
And then all of a sudden, in 2021, this huge spike comes up.
And the spike for myocarditis is something we've really never seen before.
So what does it mean?
And you're saying it's persisted at some level even though Yeah.
Well, like I said, at 90 days, 50% were still shown to have some scar.
As you start to get tissue and people die, and we do studies, there was a recent study that showed that not only big scars, but there are micro scars of people who died.
After maybe had not only the two series, but multiple boosters after that.
So this is the idea that this inflammation is now forming scars.
But these are micro scars are something that I wouldn't be able to see on a cardiac MRI, but you would have to have a piece of tissue to actually look at underneath a microscope.
And we don't like to go into the heart and take a bite of muscle from the heart.
We sometimes do it, but we really don't like to do it.
So if there's any way we can do it without going into the heart and pulling out a little chunk of heart, we'd like to do that.
You mentioned these elite athletes.
There's all these memes and so forth about this happening.
Is that a real phenomenon?
This is where it depends on whose paper you want to listen to.
Right?
A recent paper came out and said there's no increase.
They looked at this.
I think that we're really concerned as we look at these studies is, have we really gotten all the information?
Doctors have a sense, and I think a lot of people watching TV have a sense that, wow, usually we would see maybe one elite athlete die.
A year.
It would be big news.
A really, you know, a very big elite athlete.
But it seemed shortly after the COVID vaccine came out, I think everyone had a sense.
And I think that that's how a lot of science starts, especially in medicine.
We see something that gives us a hunch.
And then do we have a reason to be concerned that that hunch might be in response to something we did as doctors?
Boy, as a physician, I hate to think that I've caused harm.
Oh, I would rather not do medicine than cause harm.
I didn't go into medicine to cause harm.
Especially for this great, vibrant athlete.
I mean, I saw this one kid.
I got called down to the ER to see him.
They said, yeah, he has a low heart rate.
And he was two weeks out after his second injection.
And he was the star running back.
I mean, this kid was just, I mean, just like pure muscle and great.
I walk in the room and his heart rate's at 20. 20, right?
And I said, I said, don't you guys think somebody should be in this room with him if his heart rate is 20?
That's very low.
What would be a normal rate for someone?
An athlete might be down to 40, and that would be, I feel okay if an athlete is at 40 when he's laying under bed.
But 20 is something that concerns us.
So, I think the fact that we do have a model.
We've had, when the Koreans did autopsy studies, and we see this in sudden cardiac death, that there was inflammation in the heart, there was scarring in the heart.
As we get more and more data out, we're starting to look at these things.
And for some people, the spike protein, which is really one of the main causative agents, it's inflammatory.
That means it causes the body to respond like it's being attacked.
It's cardiotoxic.
So these are things that we have a lot of reasons to be very concerned that if there is, we have this hunch of an uptick in people dying suddenly during exercise, which puts a lot of stress on your heart.
A lot of these kids we don't find because what happens to a teenager male when you ask them, "Why don't you get up?
I'm tired.
I don't want to get up." That might be the same symptomatology if they have myocarditis.
But if all they do is sit around and maybe that's the kid who likes to play games all day and he's a gamer and he wants to be a professional gamer and so he's sitting in a chair all day.
We may never see an episode in him because he's never stressed his heart.
But if you take an elite athlete and once they get into puberty, once they get testosterone, children before puberty act differently in sports than when they're after puberty.
After puberty, they'll push themselves.
Well beyond pain.
Before, they'll just quit.
They'll just say, I'm done.
And so, when we have these elite high school athletes, and they know when something's wrong, and so they're coming and telling us, I just don't feel right.
And now what I'm seeing, now, four years later, five years later, is I'm seeing this constant and a dramatic change in who I'm seeing coming to see me.
They're complaining their heart doesn't beat normally, and it beats fast for no reason at all.
So that's what I'm seeing.
More now.
And you think that with a bit of work you might see that it's due to this scarring.
Due to the scarring, or there was a new study that came out, a preprint study out of Yale that was talking that they're looking at, and this spike protein that was supposed to be generated for a short period of time, just in your arm where you're injected, now has gone all throughout the body, And in some people, as long as they looked, they were still producing more spike protein.
So this shot that was supposed to come in, give us a short little thing of a protein, ask your body to make this protein, then your body makes an antibody response, and then it sort of stops In a lot of people, it's not stopping.
It's almost like being in a chronic vaccinated state as opposed to allowing the body to make an immune response and then settle back down.
And again, so, I mean, this highlights the fact that just all of us are different, right?
All of us have just different physiologies, different peculiarities, different genetics, you know, resulting in those different environmental factors that have influenced us.
And so something that might be, you know, just a huge problem for one person could be.
Not at all for another.
It's not a one-size-fits-all.
Not at all.
Not at all.
And I'm not trying to scare people.
I don't want to scare people.
We have enough anxiety in this world.
I don't want to add to that.
But kids had very low risk for COVID.
As a pediatrician, I was thrilled because a lot of respiratory illnesses are very hard on.
Very hard on kids.
We just had a lot of flu-A come in through this year, and it was really hard on kids.
If we have kids who have a bad RSV season, respiratory syncytial virus season, really hard on kids.
When I first started COVID coming through, Kids had no problem with it.
Part of it, their receptors are different at that age, at the young child.
And so when we went down this road of now children were going to be vaccinated, and many children had to be vaccinated to attend school, and many children had to be vaccinated to be able to play in sports.
But they really had low risk from the disease.
And so now we have this product.
For me as a pediatrician, as a pediatric cardiologist, I look, did they get any benefit from this, or did they all get risk?
But like you said, some people have no risk.
The majority of people that we can tell at this point, you ask them, you feel bad?
No.
You feel fine?
Yeah.
How was the shot?
No problem.
But everyone's different.
And so when we look at it, that's why I don't want to say, I don't want to make it out like, you know, our hospitals are filled with these kids with myocarditis.
It's not.
But we saw something that was out of normal.
And that should make us curious and go, boy, they had a low risk.
Did we do harm to them?
And I think for the most part we did.
So what's next for you as we finish up?
Primary right now is how can we help those who are injured?
Alongside of that is at the same time, how can we stop people from being injured?
So I think many of us are very concerned about the mRNA platform, which is a new platform, and the fact that the COVID vaccine is still on the recommended CDC schedule.
For children under 12, even though it is all under emergency use authorization, because there's no official approval for that medication to be used by the FDA for children under 12. And thousands of children are still getting a vaccine for a virus that really doesn't cause them significant harm at all and has significant side effects.
That I believe have reached signal long ago to be taken off the market.
So those are right now is we'd like to stop this thing that has caused so much difficulty like no other vaccine in our history.
And then how do we now help the people who are harmed?
And then the outer circle to that is how do we restore health and get the discussions going so we can rebuild trust and also help.
Well, Dr. Kirk Milhoun, such a pleasure to have had you on.
Jan, thank you very much for having me.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you all for joining Dr. Kirk Milhoun and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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